Medical robotic systems such as systems used in performing minimally invasive surgical procedures offer many benefits over traditional open surgery techniques, including less pain, shorter hospital stays, quicker return to normal activities, minimal scarring, reduced recovery time, and less injury to tissue. Consequently, demand for such medical robotic systems is strong and growing.
One example of such a medical robotic system is the da Vinci® Surgical System from Intuitive Surgical, Inc., of Sunnyvale, Calif., which is a minimally invasive robotic surgical system. The da Vinci® Surgical System has a number of robotic arms with slave manipulators that move attached medical devices, such as an image capturing device and Intuitive Surgical's proprietary EndoWrist® articulating surgical instruments, in response to movement of associated master controllers operated by a surgeon as the surgeon is viewing images on a display screen of a surgical site which have been captured by the image capturing device.
A plurality of motors is provided in the medical robotic system to actuate corresponding degrees of freedom of the slave manipulators and their attached medical devices. As an example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,424,885 entitled “Camera Referenced Control in a Minimally Invasive Surgical Apparatus,” which is incorporated herein by reference, describes a master/slave control system for controlling the position and orientation of an attached medical device by moving its manipulator in response to movement of an associated master controller.
In practice, the plurality of motors may be distributed at various locations within the robotic arm so as to be near joints or other mechanical elements that they respectively actuate. For control purposes, sensors which sense states of the motors are generally located near their respective motors. For simplicity in implementation, it may be advantageous to locate the motor's current controller within close proximity to the motor's sensors. In situations where the motor and its sensors are disposed in a small housing, however, trying to place the current controller in the same housing as its motor may result in space and/or heating problems.